On the ship of the Victorian goldfields, the resident commissioner was captain. His first mates were the assistant commissioners, magistrates and other senior civil servants; the coroner was the ship’s surgeon-superintendent. The police were the ordinary seamen, poorly paid henchmen who did the hard slog. A submission to a commission of enquiry into the Victorian police force, held in late 1854, described the boys in blue like this:
The service generally is so unpopular, that, with few exceptions, only those who are either too idle to do any thing else, or who having failed in all their other attempts to gain a livelihood as a last resource enlist into the Police, the latter, after having accumulated a little money become disgusted with the Service, and either desert or commit some fault in the hope of being discharged. This is more particularly applicable to the Police on the Gold Fields.1
On the Victorian goldfields there was also a military presence, a royal barge with its own hierarchies of power and customs of privilege. There was, of course, no ship’s matron to regulate the behaviour or check the welfare of the goldfields women.
In Ballarat, this whole clamorous crew was housed at the Government Camp. To the diggers and storekeepers, the Camp was a hive of treachery and deceit, a bastion of vested interests and autocratic inconsistency. But what of the Camp’s inhabitants? Were they sitting pretty up in their topographical tower? Enjoying a room with an enchanting view? Living the high life? Alas no. Long before the exoneration of James Bentley made the government’s compound a target of enmity, its residents were anything but happy campers.
When Assistant Commissioner James Johnston’s young bride arrived at her new home on 5 September, this is what she found. A high picket fence bound a two-acre parcel of land on the north-eastern edge of the township escarpment. (Today it is bounded by Lydiard, Mair, Camp and Sturt streets.) A second fence divided off a sloping portion of the hill near its eastern border. Parallel with this fence was a row of tents with sod chimneys. These tents were for the employees of the Gold Fields Department, such as the assistant civil commissioner, Samuel Huyghue. Behind these, more central to the picketed perimeter, were more rows of tents—mess rooms and gold commission offices—flanked by a few wooden buildings that had only recently been erected at substantial cost.
One of these housed the now-pregnant Margaret and her dear Jamie. Another was the domicile of Resident Commissioner Robert Rede. Police Inspector Gordon Evans, a twenty-nine-year-old native of Montreal, Canada, occupied another. At the rear of the Camp stretched a long line of commissariat stores. The military and police quarters—more tents—were on the northern face of the hill. There was a courthouse with a deep verandah and a prison built of logs. This ill-planned, makeshift arrangement of lodgings accommodated the civil force stationed at Ballarat, their families and servants (tent keepers, drivers, packhorse keepers) as well as the police force and military forces, including some wives and children. In total, over one hundred people were crammed into the government ghetto.2 The architects of the camp may have a method in their madness, wrote the GEELONG ADVERTISER in February 1854, but it is not easily seen. There was little evident cause for pride; nevertheless, a flagstaff ascended from beside the courthouse, its rippling Union Jack marking territory.
Margaret wrote about none of this in her diary. Took possession of our house in camp and was busy getting things put right, she recorded on 8 September.
September 9 Saturday
Still unpacking
September 10 Sunday
Made our first appearance at the church.
September 11 Monday
Received callers.
Then all goes quiet on the Johnston front. Margaret didn’t write in her diary again until 22 November. Two and a half months of blank pages. Why? Did she have nothing to say? Not even Jamie dined at the mess. Had a walk. Took tea with Mrs Lane—all activities she recorded prior to 9/11. Did she have debilitating morning sickness late in her pregnancy? Was she too busy keeping house? Or, on the contrary, was she depressingly bored? Her ship diary reveals a cheerful personality able to revel in the smallest detail of daily living. Had breakfast. Cool breeze. A wet day. A long chat after dinner. As we have seen, spring in Ballarat brought a riot of colourful events. Given the dramas she could have reported, Maggie Johnston’s silence is curiously golden.
But she could have been forgiven for finding her surroundings shamefully lacking. Her fellow inmates had been writing letters to Melbourne complaining about the conditions at the Camp for the best part of a year. In June 1854, the assistant colonial surgeon, Dr Heisse, had stepped down from his position after an enquiry into his conduct. (He had billed a digger after treating him for a gunshot wound in the Camp hospital.) I have much pleasure in resigning a situation which has been one of the greatest discomfort to my family and a personal pecuniary sacrifice, he wrote to the colonial secretary.3
A series of letters from the top dogs of the Ballarat Camp to their Melbourne superiors from February to October reveals the sort of discomfort that the Heisse family may have experienced: overcrowding, poor sanitation, substandard tents, provisional offices. Even the post office was a dark and dirty tent open at both ends to the elements. The mail was sorted on a stretcher. On a blustery day, noted the GEELONG ADVERTISER, letters were distributed on the wind to a grateful public.4 The irony is that one of the letters, penned in March, complained of the great want of proper accommodation at this Hospital owing to nearly the entire building being occupied by the Assistant Colonial Surgeon and his family, which leaves only one ward for the reception of all classes of Patients.5 Perhaps the only way to evict Heisse was to accuse him of financial impropriety.
Each of the Camp’s three independent power blocs—the Gold Fields Department, the police, and the military—had its own chain of command and own internal codes of conduct. One of the chief gripes of Camp officials was that certain factions had more access to amenities than others. It was, after all, a very small pie, and every division wanted a more generous slice of it. The bickering was fierce and incessant. The Gold Commission occupied the lion’s share of the camp grounds. Its reserve was twice as large as that of the police. Most of the police grounds were taken up by the married non-commissioned officers’ tents. There was not enough room for the foot and mounted constables—mostly young, poorly paid single men—to be accommodated. Apart from overcrowding, the lower-ranked police tents were shoddy and ill kept. The tents of the foot police were unfit for the men to reside in, wrote Sub-Inspector Taylor to his Melbourne superiors in August. The canvas tents were for the most part perfectly rotten, proof against neither rain nor sun, as they had been in use for over two years. Taylor was inspired to alert HQ to the situation after the tents were torn to shreds in a fierce storm. The rain of last night completely saturated the beds and blankets, he wrote in July, so much so that the men were all huddled together in one tent. Just as the diggers on the Flat clung to their accusations of injustice through the frigid gales of a Ballarat winter, so the soldiers anchored their despair with the weight of grievance. There have been frequent complaints of late from the men in consequence of the very great discomfort in their tents, wrote Taylor, and there does not appear any prospect of the Police Barracks being erected. Here was the nub of the problem: over eighteen months of occupation and still no sign of the promised barracks. And now Hotham was in Victoria, cutting a swathe through the colony’s £2 million deficit with razor-edged determination. Taylor knew the best he could do was request some new tents. A roof over his force’s collective sore heads was clearly too much to ask for.
An uninhabitable tent is one thing, but derelict pants are quite another. Yet on 13 July, Police Inspector Gordon Evans had the honour to inform his superiors in Melbourne that much dissatisfaction has arisen on the part of the Foot Police in this District in consequence of the high prices charged for the trousers. The problem was this: they are charged at the same rate as the mounted men whose trousers are made of fine cloth with white stripes whilst those of the Foot Police are made of a very inferior coarse pilot cloth.
Rank and file police were required to purchase their own uniforms, but they couldn’t select a supplier: they were compelled to purchase from the government stores. The snag was that coarse pilot cloth trousers exported from England could be purchased from any shopkeeper on the diggings for half the price of the colonial-made trousers supplied on contract to the government. Hence the foot police either paid a fortune for inferior itchy pants, or wore their old pair till the arse fell out of them. Not an enviable choice, especially in a Ballarat winter with the wind whistling through every crack.
It was not only the human members of the government contingent who suffered. The Camp’s stables were all falling to pieces owing to the damage done to them by the horses. Captive horses kicked at their stabling the world over, but in Hotham’s Victoria the splintered stalls were simply not repaired.
In September 1854, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes (who despite his misleading title was not actually a member of the Victoria Police but of the Gold Commission) and Robert Rede jointly wrote to Melbourne to protest that the original reserved area of the Ballarat Camp was insufficient. More land was needed. In the meantime, they applied to take over a piece of land hitherto earmarked for the police. The land, adjoining the married officers’ tents, was being used as a vegetable garden. The Camp had been unable to persuade Melbourne to appoint a gardener to raise much-needed fresh produce for its inhabitants, so an improvised cottage garden was established. In all likelihood the Camp wives cultivated the unofficial garden, just as women generally tended the home vegetable plots on the diggings. D’Ewes wanted to use the land for his own residence.
Of all the senior officials, D’Ewes was the one who complained the loudest about the inadequacy and injustice of his domestic circumstances. He had missed out on one of the newly erected wooden homes. Robert Rede’s house, completed in September, cost £1,200. Inspector Evans’ house cost £1000. Even the colonial architect had a handsome new cottage. D’Ewes, by stark contrast, was living in the small walled-in verandah attached to the court building, a space that was also used as a jury room for nine weeks of the year. When he couldn’t sleep on the verandah, he had to share someone’s tent.
The affront and the material deprivation of this situation stuck in D’Ewes’ craw like a fish bone. On 3 August he wrote to the colonial secretary that
the accommodation for the Police Magistrate at this most important gold field is decidedly worse than that of any other officer stationed at this place…Good houses are built or in the process of being built at large costs for the heads of all other departments.
He stressed the importance of his position. He complained that he could not offer the hospitality to passing strangers that was expected from one of his station. He offered to pay a portion of the expense of building a residence. The colonial secretary was unmoved. The issue was held over until the spring. When the matter had not been dealt with by late September, D’Ewes tried again, twice, but this time he gave an indication that his distress did not merely relate to his unaccommodated ego: I have sent upwards of £500 of property to Ballarat as well as my wife and family. No house is in process of erection for the Police Magistrate, he wrote, I am totally without quarters for myself and family and an exception to all the officers on the Camp. By now it was 28 September—about a week before Scobie’s murder—and Hotham himself responded to this latest letter. In shirty tones the governor asked, Does Mr Dews [sic] suppose the request forgotten? Can he not imagine that some good cause may exist for the delay?6 But by this stage D’Ewes was simply pleading for a tent of his own, forget a building, so that he could move his wife and child from their expensive hotel into the Camp. As fate would have it, D’Ewes did not get to stay in Ballarat long enough to see even so much as a bivouac come his way. On 4 November, he was dismissed as a magistrate, the first formal victim of the Eureka Hotel affair. The non-commissioned officers’ wives would get to keep their vegie patch.
It is tempting to think that at least the married officers were content, but no. On 14 June, Evans reported to Melbourne on the inadequacy of the married non-commissioned officers quarters being located next to the unmarried commissioned officers quarters. Those tents, he advised, were supposed to be used for the non-commissioned officers’ servants. That they were instead occupied by the unmarried officers led to inconvenience and unpleasantness. There were three grounds for rectifying the untenable situation, argued Evans. 1. The proximity of this building to the officers’ quarters admits of every word that is spoken in one being heard in the other. 2. The servants were too far away. 3. The non-commissioned officers quarters were too small and not at all adapted to accommodate married non-commissioned officers. Married people could not be expected to do what married people do with all the world watching and listening. And then have to stomp all the way across the Camp to fetch a servant to wash the sheets!
It wasn’t just the superior ranks of police who were disgruntled by the conditions of their employment. Some in the lower echelons of police were going completely off the deep end in the Black Hole of Calcutta, which is how Samuel Huyghue described the Camp. In July, Sub-Inspector Taylor had cause to write to his immediate Ballarat superior, Inspector Gordon Evans, about the meltdown of Constable Patrick Hopkins. Hopkins, while searching for unlicensed miners, was getting under the influence of liquor. Taylor cautioned him:
A short time after I saw him go into a public house and call for drink. I prevented his being served with any, about a half an hour after this two respectable women came to me saying that he had been into their tents and insulted them, one of the women was crying. I perceived that he was then very drunk I immediately ordered him under arrest, he flourished his baton and flung it from him.
Hopkins then struck another officer and shouted that he wanted to be discharged from the police. The exhibition he made on the Gold Fields, worried Taylor, was calculated to bring disgrace on the force.
It wouldn’t have taken much. The police cohort at Ballarat did not exactly float on a tide of public esteem. Reports from Inspector Gordon Evans to Melbourne throughout 1854 attest to either the low standard of recruits or the effects of the conditions on formerly upstanding fellows. Police constable John Reagan was suspended for being not shaved, dirty, and having all the appearance of an habitual drunkard. Daniel Wright was discharged with bad character as he was frequently under the influence of liquor. Trooper James Butler was transferred to the foot police due to being a very slovenly man who knows nothing of horses. Arthur Shirvington was imprisoned in the Camp lockup for two days after he went absent without leave all night and returned home drunk and fighting in public houses. Acting Sergeant John Dougherty was found in Canadian Gully lying in a state of stupidity from the effects of drink. Thomas Milne was sentenced to three days’ imprisonment for being drunk on guard. In August the lockup keeper requested the sub-inspector to accompany him to the prison to see the state of the Sentry posted there…the sentry was lying on his face and hands insensibly drunk, his arms were placed by the side of the door…the man was in such a state that he was obliged to be carried away on the shoulders of another man. Constable John Regan was given three days’ imprisonment for making use of abusive and highly obscene language to Sgt Rutter while in the execution of his duty. The bench sentenced Constable William Thompson to three months’ imprisonment for habitual drunkenness. Thompson was presently labouring under a very severe attack of Delirium tremens.
There is a theme emerging.
By late August, Evans was asked to explain what he intended to do about his force’s appalling behaviour and morale. He responded that he couldn’t discharge all the men whom he rightfully should due to their inveterate habitual drunkenness. If he took such drastic action, he wouldn’t have enough men to do the job. The number of commissioned officers was already much below its authorised number and those who were in the Camp frequently complain of their duties being rendered more arduous in consequence of this insufficiency. Guards on night shift were forced to perform on the following day various backbreaking tasks (including carting wood and water, which should have been the job of a paid labourer) and frequently that of searching for unlicensed miners. He also wished to point out:
the great discomfort and hardships endured by the men during the past winter owing to the want of proper accommodation and which no doubt of itself tended to make them unhappy and discontented, there being no Barracks and on many occasions no stretchers or blankets for them in the miserable tents they were compelled to live in.
Many men had either applied for discharges, committed some heinous act in the hope of being discharged or simply deserted. In July, one brave and uncommonly literate constable, L. H. Webb, had written directly to the chief commissioner of police requesting a discharge. He knew the proper procedure was to go through Ballarat’s inspector, but he was loath to do so because of Evans’ past form in taunting and bullying his men. I am not a drunken soldier, wrote Webb,
I can pluck up spirit to complain of oppression… petty tyranny should be restrained and the advantages of position should not be a vantage ground wherein the officer may insult and wound the feelings of an inferior with impunity.
Was this a trap or a digger? The language employed by those on the hill and those on the flats to express grievance was eerily similar.
The third sibling squabbling over its puny share of the pie of the civil service and the police was the military. By the winter of 1854, the members of the 40th Regiment stationed at Ballarat were still housed in leaky, breezy tents. The garrison included some army wives. Corporal John Neill, an Irishman, lived in the Camp with his wife, Ellen, and their baby, Fanny, who had been born in Waterford shortly before her parents’ departure for Australia. Neill kept a diary that speaks poignantly of the conflict between his family duties and his military role. He wrote of having to coax his daughter to sleep in her cot on the hill, only to have her awaken screaming as gun shots rang out on the flats each night.7 Ellen Neill was certainly not the only military wife in the Camp, but since the army didn’t keep records of its wives, there is no information about any others.
There was, however, a surfeit of correspondence regarding all other matters of daily intercourse. From June to December, the military leadership waged a campaign of paper warfare on the Colonial Office, with the strategic aim of securing a new barracks for the soldiers stationed at Ballarat. A barrage of letters flew between Ballarat and Melbourne. As the Camp was so overcrowded, the military proposed constructing a new building adjacent to but not within the present limits of the Camp. The Colonial Office prevaricated, suggesting it planned to sell the present Camp site and build a far more commodious Camp of stone buildings on a site one hundred yards from the present one. It was clear to all, however, that this could not happen. Town allotments had already been sold all around the Camp, which was now boxed in by private property. There was simply no room to expand. It was a great error in the first instance not to have made a larger Reserve for the Government Establishments, wrote Assistant Engineer Henry Lane—if for no other reason than that the Camp’s congested tangle of wood and canvas structures was a perfect firetrap. One spark and the whole place would go up in flames.
Meanwhile, once the police command got wind of the military’s intention to station its contingent outside the Camp’s perimeter, it made a rearguard pitch to secure any new barracks for itself. Who would get the improved quarters, should they ever be built, was now in dispute. Robert Rede conceded the impossibility of ever making the Ballarat Camp a good one.8
If it was tense and uncomfortable on the inside, there was no relief to be had outside the Camp. Relations between the mining community and the police, soldiers and government officials had been on the nose for months. There are no Standing Orders for the guidance of the Force, one man wrote anonymously to the Police Commission of Enquiry, consequently the men are very often led unwittingly into the committal of acts of harshness which inflames the Public Mind against the Government and its employees.9 The informant suggested that issuing a rulebook to every officer would be a good start to rebuilding trust. But it would take more than an etiquette manual to restore public confidence. After the Eureka Hotel riot, the serfs began to smell fear in their masters. On 22 October, Thomas Pierson recorded in his diary that the soldiers and police don’t dare leave the Camp. People would hoot at them in the street, jeer as they rode high in their saddles, shout Joe! Joe! Joe!—a snappy goldfields pejorative for the pigs, the filth.
And there was precedent for what could happen when local outrage against the British imperial ruling class, and its blatant disregard for citizens’ aspirations to democratic rights and freedoms, boiled over. In Canada in 1837, eight hundred followers of a popular reformist movement marched on Toronto armed with pitchforks, staves and guns, in an attempt to overthrow the oligarchic administration and establish self-government. Local militias mercilessly put down the uprising. But the Upper Canada rebellions of 1838 ultimately led to the introduction of responsible government and the end of authoritarian rule in Canada. Gordon Evans’ father was a general in the British army stationed in Canada and may have been stationed in Quebec—a witness to the carnage.
On 27 October, the day after Andrew McIntyre and Thomas Fletcher were arbitrarily arrested for their alleged role in the Eureka Hotel arson, a plan was hatched to defend the indefensible Camp.
There was more pissing on posts happening in the Ballarat Camp than all the chained guard dogs of the diggings could manage in a month of Sundays. As chief of the civil force, Resident Commissioner Robert Rede was theoretically entitled to choose his post. Or was he? In-fighting about accommodation was just the acquisitive tip of a looming iceberg of power struggles within the Camp.
The foremost clash was between Rede (aged thirty-nine) and Police Inspector Gordon Evans (aged twenty-nine). Evans was appointed to Ballarat in February 1854, Rede in May. They were both on a salary of £700 a year. As we have seen from the parliamentary fallout over the Eureka Hotel fire, both manipulated the curious power vacuum when it suited them to avoid ultimate responsibility. But the fact is that these men were engaged in a dispute that began in June over the Camp’s hierarchy and demarcation. The conflict started when Evans wrote to the chief commissioner of police in Melbourne regarding Rede’s requests to station more police at Creswick Creek. Was Evans in charge of his men’s movements or not? Why was Rede involving himself in matters of policing? By late September, the dispute was putatively resolved when a circular was sent from Melbourne stating that at all times Rede was to have paramount authority.10 Evans was clearly still smarting about this when he blamed Rede for the riot outside Bentley’s Hotel.
The riot was the unanticipated turning point in Rede’s one-upmanship with Evans. He now had to back up his dominant position: prove that the powers-that-be in Melbourne had shown faith in the right fellow. He wasn’t just demonstrating to the irritated and unruly digging community that insubordination would not be tolerated. He was performing for his own troops as well. And not all in Melbourne were in one mind about Rede’s fitness to command a sinking ship. A week after the hotel riot, the chief commissioner of police publicly recorded his opinion that in consequence of the still excited state of this Gold Field [Ballarat]… it is probable that we may not be able to avoid a collision. In the face of a powerful mob—in particular the Tipperary Mob, one of the most powerful and troublesome to contend with and who seem bent on mischief—the chief commissioner called for a reinforcement of police numbers. The Camp, he believed, was impossible to defend.11 Did Rede take it as a personal slight or a judgment on the architectural and geographic insecurity of the site? It was Rede who ordered the arrest of Fletcher and McIntyre to give a fearful lesson.12 But a lesson to whom?
What Ballarat’s resident commissioner needed was an ally. Instead, he had Gordon Evans.
When Evans was appointed as police inspector of Ballarat in February 1854, his appointment met with great dissatisfaction from both residents and the force he was to command. On first hearing the news, police officers piled their arms and refused to serve under Evans, while the GEELONG ADVERTISER labelled his appointment a decided insult to the inhabitants of Ballarat. At twenty-nine, Evans had already made a lifetime’s worth of enemies. In March, the diggers and storekeepers of Ballarat got up a petition against the appointment, outlining instances of his past abuses of power and insisting that no self-respecting man will submit to the control of a tyrannical Inspector. The GEELONG ADVERTISER, reporting the signing of the petition, warned of the rapidly increasing dangerous position of disorder under Evans.13 This was all before Evans and Rede began their cutthroat pas de deux. Frederick Vern later wrote that it was the sneering conduct of Captain Evans during the meeting to protest Scobie’s murder that was the direct cause of the burning down of the Eureka Hotel. Evans drew heated criticism from many quarters, but the most open challenge to his fitness for office, the loudest call for the redress of wrongs inflicted by his hand came from a woman. The stone was cast by one of those troublesome non-commissioned officers’ wives.
On 27 October—just eleven days after the Eureka Hotel riot and the same day that the Camp drew up plans for its defence—Mrs Catherine McLister served a written complaint to the chief commissioner of police, Captain McMahon. Catherine was the wife of Sergeant Robert McLister, who was based at the Ballarat Camp. Catherine was a twenty-eight-year-old Irish woman from County Donegal, newly married to Robert, then a clerk. Marrying down, she had arrived in Victoria in late 1853. This is what she wrote in her explosive letter to McMahon:
I beg to state that about two months ago Capt Evans grossly insulted me a non-commissioned officer’s wife by indecently expressing his person in his own room and also by his frequent visits to my tent in the absence of my husband.14
Catherine was clearly literate and unfazed by the bureaucracy of sin. As the second daughter of William Fenton, a member of the Northern Irish Protestant gentry and the governor at the jail in Lifford, a British army garrison, she had been raised on a diet of discipline and punishment.
Captain McMahon took Catherine’s complaint with due gravity. He investigated her claim and found that the explanation forwarded by the Inspector of Police was insufficient. McMahon came to Ballarat and assembled a board to hear evidence from both parties. The board was comprised of Police Magistrate Charles Hackett, a Protestant Irish barrister with a splendid set of blond whiskers, Police Magistrate Evelyn Pitfield Shirley Sturt, the East India man who took over from D’Ewes after his dishonourable discharge, and Robert Rede. Hackett and Sturt had both served on the board of enquiry into the burning of the Eureka Hotel. Sturt would go on to serve as a member of the royal commission on the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition. The three men made for a formidable inquisition.
The board of enquiry sat on 28 October. Catherine’s original letter was read aloud. Then Gordon Evans came out swinging. He wholly disputed Catherine’s claim of impropriety. He did craftily admit that a certain degree of familiarity has existed between us but said that he had always considered that that familiarity was sought for by her. But Catherine was not intimidated by the suggestion of her implied consent to Evans’ familiarities. Before the board, with Evans present, Catherine gave this extraordinary testimony:
I was working at my tent. Mr Evans came down and asked me to sew a few buttons on his shirt. I told him to send them by his servant. He said the servant was busy and asked me to go for them. He said if he was not there I should find them on the table. I said if my husband will allow me, I will go. I asked my husband who had no objection—this was in the evening not dark about 4. I went to Mr Evans and he shut the door and locked it—I did not know it was locked until it had occasion to be opened. He pointed out the shirts…Mr Evans came behind me and put his arm round my waist. He was dressed, the front of his pantaloons were open and his person exposed…Mr Evans did not use any violence when he put his arm round my waist. He said ‘look at this’ and then I saw his trousers were undone.
Catherine was not finished. I was always suspicious of Mr Evans, from the way he looked at me, she said, he was very often down at my tent. I often would not answer him. He came when he knew my husband was off the camp as he had given him leave. She distrusted his motives, she said, but never thought he would accost her.
The offence had taken place two months earlier. Catherine had not told anybody, including her husband. She was coming forward now, she said, because her husband had recently been arrested and mistreated by Evans, which, she believed, was because she had not complied with Mr Evans desire.
Perhaps Catherine was also inspired to action by a meeting of fifteen thousand members of the digging community who had gathered on 22 October—five days before the date of her complaint—at Bakery Hill to raise funds for the defence of McIntyre and Fletcher. At the meeting, the people had passed a resolution condemning the daily violation of the personal liberty of the subject. Did Catherine see a parallel between the scape-goating of McIntyre and Fletcher and her husband’s susceptibility to Evans’ wrath? Did she equate the violation of her own body with the liberal agenda of the mass body politic? Did she liken male predation and female vulnerability to the autocratic misrule that was clearly occurring on both sides of the Camp’s white picketed perimeter? Perhaps she was simply a wrathful woman responding to the anger in the air. Perhaps Evans was simply a letch, and Ballarat’s culture of complaint gave Catherine licence to warn him off for good.
Next Evans cross-examined Catherine. She acknowledged that she had been in Evans’ room several times, in order to do small jobs for him, with her husband’s permission. Evans had never before insulted her. He had joked but was tartly answered. Nothing a girl who had grown up in a garrison town could not handle. Evans had often been to her tent, but was never admitted. I positively deny that any improper familiarity existed between myself and Mr Evans, she told the board firmly.
Mrs Elizabeth Crowther, another officer’s wife, came forward as a witness. Mrs Crowther was often in Mrs McLister’s tent because it was more comfortable than mine and for the sake of company. She testified that [Catherine] never told me that Mr Evans had taken any liberties with her, but she seemed to be afraid of being with Mr Evans alone. Robert Kane, servant to Evans, swore that Mrs McLister had previously been to the captain’s room to put buttons on his shirts but I never saw her look excited when she left. Would ‘looking excited’ be a good thing or a bad thing, though? A sign of guilty pleasure or of furious indignation?
Catherine herself cross-examined the witnesses, who could not fault her character. Only one witness, Sergeant Major Robert Milne, hinted at a motivation for Catherine to make a false claim: that Evans had put her husband under arrest and that he had overheard Captain McLister say that somebody would have to pay for it. Evans swooped on this logic, claiming that the vindictive motives of the prosecution were self evident.
The board deliberated briefly before declaring that Catherine’s charge could not be supported. The decision was unanimous. Rede might have made use of the occasion in the war against his rival; he chose not to. The board’s reasoning was that Catherine had not told anyone about the incident at the time, not even her intimate friend Mrs Crowther. Surely an offended woman would admit the source of her shock to another woman. Further, the board found it improbable that such a gross insult—Evans flashing his John Thomas—would not occasion a woman to cry for help.
That the impulse of the moment would naturally have led to exclamation on the part of Mrs McLister, which must have been heard, on the contrary the shirts alluded to were taken away by Mrs McLister for the purpose required.
So, if Catherine had made a more womanly scene—throwing the shirts up in the air and running from the room shrieking—she might have been believed. But having calmly instigated an official enquiry, she found her claim dismissed as vexatious.
The McLister incident was not quietly dismissed as a quaint colonial bedroom farce. The board’s decision was forwarded to Governor Hotham in Melbourne. In the context of other recent acts of rebelliousness in Ballarat, Catherine’s stand might have been viewed as yet more evidence of the mounting tension, antagonism and complex web of deceit of which His Excellency needed to be kept abreast. A woman taking senior officials to task—the inspector of police, no less—was further proof that the entire Ballarat population was disorderly and ungovernable and thus required a firm hand.
On 6 November, Hotham appended a note to the McLister file with his characteristic brevity: The Report of the Board is conclusive. That the complainant was a woman may have been another factor in keeping close tabs on the intra-Camp skirmish. Men who made a fuss in the Camp could be dealt with by their immediate hierarchical superiors. But wives like Catherine McLister were not servants of the state; only their husbands could discipline them. And if their husbands could not?
Trouble.
There are few traces of Mrs Catherine McLister other than the transcripts of her day in court and her death certificate, which reveals that she died during the birth of her first child, James, in March 1858 in Geelong. By this time, Robert McLister’s profession was listed as gold digger, indicating that his wife’s principled action may have cost him his job.15 Catherine had suffered from consumption for over four years and the official cause of her death was phthisis larengis, throat lesions caused by acute tuberculosis. Baby James died of debility eleven days later. It’s unclear why Catherine and Robert chose to migrate to Victoria (her health? his career? the recent deaths of her father and sister?), whether her upbringing in County Donegal nurtured an insubordinate spirit or how a well-heeled woman felt about living in a windblown tent at the arse-end of the colonial world. But there is no doubt that Catherine’s official complaint was a radical act of disclosure: her way of saying look at this.
There are many unanswered questions around Catherine’s courageous decision to haul a police inspector before a judicial board. But the case clearly demonstrates two important points. First, her vocal opposition to being manhandled by Evans shows that while the Camp may have been a bastion of power and privilege—male privilege—it was not an exclusively male domain. It was a civil base camp-cum-garrison that housed women alongside their partners. They walked its muddy corridors, slept under its canvas ceilings, serviced its masters and provided corporeal fodder for the fantasies and responsibilities of men. Catherine’s presence lends another perspective to the mood and motivation of the Camp when faced with threats of attack from the rebellious digging population. Yes, the Camp represented an ancien regime sandbagging itself against the tides of democratic change: the Camp was ‘The Man’, and the diggers and storekeepers believed it was time to stick it to The Man. But the Camp was also an isolated and physically vulnerable outpost of imperial authority, in which husbands daily feared for the safety of their wives and children. Both from enemies without, and, it appears, from within. The presence of women at the Camp restores some of the humanity to the men on the offensive side of the Stockade, even crude bullies like Evans.16
Second, in witnessing the power struggles in a gendered world, we come to realise that the Camp was not a unified, harmonious entity—as its cosily inclusive label might suggest. The battles being fought on the Ballarat diggings were not so black and white as the conventional ‘miners versus military’ line-up implies. Rather, tensions around ethnicity, rank and sex fuelled internal resentments, even while, as Samuel Huyghue described, the commissioners maintained an aristocratic and exclusive front, tricked out in scraps of braid and gold lace…and often redolent of perfume…faithful to the prescriptions of caste. Once the crack appears—and Catherine McLister’s public defiance of abusive relationships of authority constitutes such a fissure—we can begin to prise open the surprisingly brittle front of goldfields officialdom.
If Chief Commissioner McMahon in Melbourne could see the writing on the tatty canvas walls, he should have paid heed to just one line in the barrage of correspondence issuing from the Camp. On 25 September, Captain Evans warned I have not accommodation beyond my own complement of men for any emergency that may arise. Three weeks later Bentley’s Hotel was a pile of cinders and the whole miserable, maudlin, mutinous Camp was under siege. Or, more precisely, it was in the grip of a siege mentality, as not a single stone had yet been hurled in the Camp’s direction. But the mere scent of a digger revolt rising up from the Flat, compounded by internal chaos, was enough to frighten the horses.
On 24 October, a company of twenty-eight mounted troops from the 40th Regiment arrived in Ballarat, led by the veteran warrior Captain Thomas. Four days later, two more companies, one from the 40th, one from the 12th Regiment, marched from Melbourne to the already swollen Camp. Defending the Camp meant strengthening its numbers. By the month’s end, there were over 260 members of the military concertinaed into a few rows of ragged tents. The population of the Camp had tripled in a matter of weeks.
As the pre-summer temperature began to climb, so the pressure of living cheek by jowl intensified. The whole situation is reminiscent of that classic scene from the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera, when the stowaway Groucho is hiding in a tiny ship’s bolthole. People keep knocking on his door—a porter, a maid, another Marx brother—and he stuffs them into his cabin like sardines. Make that two, no, make that three hard boiled eggs, he says to the waiter outside the door, trying to keep up with the swelling numbers. Critical mass is finally reached, and when a newcomer opens the door, the whole heaving contingent spews out in a flume of cascading bodies and luggage and lunch.
High camp.